


operation throw mick a surprise birthday party (or: how ray palmer got grounded for the very first time)

by novoaa1



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: (they don't get paid at all actually but that's besides the point), Bonfires, Charlie being a lil shit, Established Sara Lance/Ava Sharpe, F/F, F/M, Human Disaster Ray Palmer, Humor, Legends of Tomorrow Team are Family, Mick Rory Deserves Better, Mick just wants his beer, Nora is too, POV Ray Palmer, POV Sara Lance, Ray Palmer is a Good Bro, Ray's smitten, Team Dynamics, Team Feels, Team Fluff, Team as Family, The Waverider (DC's Legends of Tomorrow), Unresolved Romantic Tension, also sara and ava don't get paid enough to put up with this shit, and gary's very upset, and now there's a cake on the ceiling, being fuckin idiots together bc thats what matters, but most importantly, charlie gets a front row seat to the awkward flirting, i know that's not a super popular opinion but i think he's the best, i rlly love mick rory, idk - Freeform, john just wants a light, like that's it that's the whole fic, might come back to edit it later, nora and ray are very awkward, not sure, questionable life choices, she's unamused, thinking about extending this?, this is literally just about the legends being fuckin idiots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 04:17:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18612979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novoaa1/pseuds/novoaa1
Summary: Ray finds out Mick has never celebrated his birthday. He resolves to change that.It goes... about as well as you'd expect. (Threats are made, knives are thrown, many things are set aflame—the usual.)Also, who invited Gary?





	1. 2018 the waverider: where everyone almost dies. again.

**Author's Note:**

> this is just something i thought of a couple hours ago.. and i'm thinking i might come back and add more parts? i have an idea for where it might go, but... idk. we'll see. 
> 
>  
> 
> first work in this fandom—would love to hear any feedback!

“Hold on. So you’ve never had a birthday party? _Ever?_ ” Ray’s eyes were almost comically wide as he promptly halted his cheerful scrubbing of a dirty plate from this morning’s breakfast. 

 

Mick just grunted where he sat stuffing his face and downing another beer, seemingly unperturbed by Ray’s incredulous gaze. 

 

“So what?” His words were muffled around unreasonably large chunks of hamburger straining against bulging cheeks, the large man slouched lazily in his seat, his dirty boots resting on the table of the Waverider’s kitchen-slash-dining-room.

 

Ray sighed, wincing slightly as he eyed Mick’s mud-caked heels soiling the table he’d _just_ cleaned with globs of dirt and gravel, but decided in the end that there were more important things—like the fact that Mick Rory had never been thrown a birthday party in his honor. (And also the fact that Nora had looked positively _radiant_ this morning dressed in simple jeans and a sheer burgundy V-neck, bare-faced save for the tiniest hint of gloss on pouting red lips, because, _Wow_.) 

 

He shook himself out of his thoughts— _Focus, Palmer._

 

“What about a birthday cake?” Ray asked suddenly, placing himself neatly in the seat to Mick’s left, thinking that _surely_ the stoic man had been given a cake on his birthday at one point or another, even despite never having had a celebratory gathering, because—

 

“I thought they only did that on TV,” he replied gruffly with a scrunched expression, one that looked uncannily like constipation (though Ray just knew that to be his thinking face—a lot of things were very confusing for Mick to conceptualize, he’d found).

 

Ray opened his mouth to protest, but was swiftly interrupted: “Thought they only did what on TV?” came Charlie’s distinctively accented voice as she strolled confidently past the two seated men and into the kitchen, dressed in her trademark torn black skinny jeans and a loose white tee with a close-up shot of a bug-eyed Johnny Rotten on the front.

 

Mick just grunted again; then, clearly feeling the shape-shifter’s expectant eyes upon him, began to feign a sudden interest in his beer bottle, squinting dramatically as if to read its label even as Charlie quirked an unimpressed brow behind the counter and Ray suppressed a deep sigh. 

 

“Birthday cakes,” Ray supplied eventually, answering for a stubbornly tight-lipped Mick.

 

“Oh yeah,” Charlie replied breezily with a nod, a faraway look creeping into her eyes as she poured herself a bowl of cereal. “My mum always bought the best chocolate cake from the corner store to bring back for me.” She stopped herself then, seeming to snap out of the memory as she poured her milk and snatched a spoon from the drawer. “Hold on a tic,” she mused after circling the counter to take a seat next to Ray at the table, pointing the silver spoon towards a stone-faced Mick with a smirk. “Have you never had a birthday party?”

 

The man just glared at her for a long moment—after what felt like an eternity, he blinked. “I need another beer,” Mick grumbled, his chair sliding backwards with a screech as he stood.

 

Ray just watched curiously (and with a hint of sadness) as Mick trudged to the fridge and wrenched it open, claiming his ice-cold prize in leather-clad hands with a furrowed brow. “Stop staring at me like a kicked puppy, Haircut,” he growled without looking up, twisting the beer cap off with a practiced but clumsy maneuver and stomping back to join Charlie and Ray at the table. 

 

The scientist just blinked, mouth slightly agape as he racked his brain for a response. “You tracked mud through the kitchen,” he managed after a long moment.

 

“Better,” Mick grumbled his approval, lifting his boot-clad feet to rest again on the table as he took a long swig of beer.

 

Ray just sighed heavily even as Charlie munched happily on her cereal next to him—he had to fix this.

 

❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄

 

In retrospect, Ray probably should’ve thought about this more thoroughly… though, in his defense, he had been in a bit of a time crunch. According to Gideon, Mick’s birthday was almost at its end (well, in Hong Kong, at least), meaning his teammate’s magical day would only last for 12 more hours in America. 

 

The clock was ticking, and he knew it’d be a difficult task—this was Mick, after all.

 

So, he’d been forced to think of something. Quick. 

 

He’d gathered Zari, Nate, Charlie, Nora (which, had her eyes always been that green? Seriously, they looked like sparkling gemstones and he— _Focus, Ray!_ he scolded himself), Constantine, Mona, Gary (wait, why was Gary here?), then Sara and Ava (which was easily one of the scariest things he’d ever done—he wouldn’t be making the mistake anytime soon of portaling himself into Ava’s apartment without calling first; he’s quite positive he’d never been so profanely threatened with such grievous bodily harm in his _life_ ). 

 

Once they were all assembled and relatively quiet in the dining room (which, by the way, had been no small task—it took him upwards of 15 minutes to make Gary stop regaling a wide-eyed Mona with the tale of how he’d valiantly lost his nipple to the rather fussy unicorn at Woodstock, not even to mention de-escalating a heated argument between a smug John Constantine and an exceedingly irritated Ava Sharpe), he brought out a tall chocolate cake with red frosting (constructed scrupulously under Gideon’s careful supervision).

 

Then, he announced the plan: they would turn off the lights and hide until Mick inevitably came into the kitchen searching for yet another beer, then abruptly flick them on again and jump out yelling “Surprise!” (Ray would be holding the cake), making for an exciting prelude to Mick Rory’s first ever birthday celebration. 

 

Despite having to wrangle a less-than-enthusiastic group of Legends into agreeing with his plan (“He’s not gonna be happy,” Nate had whined; Zari’s eyes were almost comically wide as she protested, “'Not happy’? He’s gonna flame our asses! And then I'll _never_ get to see Mount St. Helens...”; “We’re all gonna die,” Mona had mumbled sadly as Gary nodded his assent beside her), Ray had been fairly confident that it was going to go well. 

 

_Maybe Mick will even_ thank _me!_ he'd thought gleefully.

 

He’d been wrong. 

 

He’d been very, _very_ wrong. 

 

The kitchen and dining room were in complete disarray, the walls charred and smelling strongly of rancid smoke, a sharp knife embedded in the sideways remains of the broken table, a deep set of matching hand-shaped grooves sunken into the metal walls, pieces of red-frosted chocolate cake falling from the ceiling onto the floor with mildly off-putting noises—all a direct result of a startled but very trigger-happy Mick, the assassin-quick reflexes of their fiery captain (in addition to her knife quivering in the table, there was also a throwing star buried in the wooden cabinets), a steeled-up Nate screaming an octave higher than seemed humanly possible as he braced himself from the flames (hence the hand-shaped grooves in the wall and the badly broken table), and a speechless Ray who’d found himself launching the cake into the ceiling with a loud _splat!_ as Mona tackled him from the side (thus saving him from the heated blast of Mick’s flame thrower contraption). 

 

So fine, Ray thought as he stood with an amused Charlie and a gobsmacked Nora in the wrecked kitchen, surrounded by the aftermath of his horribly failed attempt at a birthday party for Mick—maybe this wasn’t his best idea. 

 

(“You,” Sara had said, pointing a stern finger at Ray, “are going to clean this up. Now.” He gulped. 

 

Mick had just stared at the cake stuck to the ceiling, then at Ray, then back to the cake again, shrugging his shoulders and re-holstering his flame-thrower—then, after picking through the wreckage to retrieve the beer he’d come for from the fridge, promptly turned and left. 

 

Charlie had burst out laughing, which, _not_ helpful; Mona had fled rather quickly with a squeak, while Nate had announced that he would be going to the library to read something happy in the wake of the considerable trauma he’d just been subjected to, and that he was not to be disturbed under _any_ circumstance unless, of course, it was discovered that the moon landing in 1969 had indeed been faked. 

 

Constantine had just scoffed at the chaotic scene before him, bending to light the cigarette in his mouth with the flaming box of cereal on the countertop despite Ava’s disapproving eye roll, then leaving with a “This was brilliant, squire; let’s do it again sometime!” thrown over his shoulder even as Ray gaped.

 

Then Ava, having finally seemed to recover her mental faculties, lectured a contrite Ray about Bureau regulations and responsibility before turning swiftly to make her exit, presumably for her treasured “alone time” with their Captain; meanwhile, Gary was blubbering incoherently about nipples and unicorns and flaming Beebo gods as he crawled on hands and knees away from the flames—no one was all that inclined to offer their help.)

 

“Okay, I admit it,” he announced to the two women beside him, his eye twitching slightly as another chunk of cake fell to the floor with a loud _splat!_ “That didn’t go as well as I’d hoped.” 

 

Charlie didn’t respond, just snickered at his side even as he could feel Nora turning to glare at him. 

 

“You think?!” she demanded in a shrill tone, her green-eyed gaze positively burning into him. 

 

_Is it bad that I’m finding this attractive?_ he thought idly. 

 

Then he realized she was staring expectantly up at him, brow quirked ( _Wow, she’s beautiful_ )—probably waiting for a response, he thought. 

 

_Uhhhhhh_ —

 

“You look really pretty today,” he blurted out dumbly before he could stop himself, quickly clapping a hand over his mouth as Nora’s eyes widened in response because Oh, _no_. 

 

The woman blinked owlishly, her earlier irritation forgotten. “I… I do?” 

 

Ray blushed deeply, feeling an awkward chuckle bubble from his chest. “I mean, well—Yeah, you know, you always look prett—Beautiful, really—Not that I’m like always watching you or anything, because that would be _super_ weird—"

 

“Christ,” came Charlie’s exasperated voice, an appalled look on her features as the two whirled around to look at her in surprise, clearly having forgotten that there was someone else still there. “Get a room.”

 

With that, the spunky woman strutted out of the kitchen, grumbling something under her breath about ‘awkward idiots at a middle school dance,’ leaving the heavily blushing and love-struck duo to gawk helplessly after her. 

 

❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄


	2. 1999 phoenix, arizona: the rise of the satanic fire-worshipping cult

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mick's birthday excursion gets quickly out of hand. 
> 
> Sara and Ava are not amused.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm thinking about adding more parts? not sure yet.... would love to know what you think :)

It’d been a long week for Sara Lance: she’d had to yell at Constantine yet _again_ for prancing around the Waverider butt-naked and permanently scarring every unfortunate soul in his path (the eccentric British man had claimed it to be a “balm” on his damned soul, but really, she couldn’t have cared less—she'd just told him to cut it out before he found himself on the wrong end of a throwing knife); she’d also been forced to scold an ever-unapologetic Mick who’d recently adopted the absurd habit of foregoing the use of their perfectly functional communal toaster and instead utilizing his flame-thrower to toast bread in the mornings despite the protests of literally every person onboard the ship; and because all of that just seemingly wasn’t enough, the typically overly-responsible Ray had thought up the _brilliant_ plan to throw their residential fire-obsessed alcoholic arsonist a surprise birthday party of all things, thereby taking a proverbial sledgehammer to what had been her first blissfully uninterrupted date night with Ava in a Long Freaking Time.

 

Now the walls of the kitchen-slash-dining-room were charred, causing that entire side of the Waverider to smell like a life-long chain-smoker's living quarters, and you know what? Sara had decided she was _not_ going to apologize for the knife in the table or the throwing star still embedded in the cabinets—stab marks in their upholstery was the least of their concerns at the moment. 

 

No, right now she was glaring at the utterly damning footage from Gideon on her screen (Ava beside her wearing a similarly unamused expression), willing the ship to reach 1999 Phoenix, Arizona like, _yesterday_ , so that she could ground Ray Palmer and the rest of her idiot Time Children for being so goddamned _stupid_. 

 

(And yeah, stop them from fucking up the timeline; that, too, she supposed.)

 

To be fair, her day had started fairly normal—the ‘Surprise Birthday’ incident was a full 48 hours behind them (practically ancient history, as Legend fuck-ups go), there was no longer birthday cake smeared across the ceiling and floor of the dining room, and Ray was too busy drooling over Nora Darhk to even bother coming up with a new birthday plan for Mick after his last one had failed so spectacularly. 

 

Or, so she’d thought. 

 

She’d called Ava over for wine in her quarters, and suffice it all to say, the unusual quiet around the Waverider was easily the last thing on her mind while Ava was in her bed and pinning her to the mattress and doing _that_ with her tongue—for all she cared, John could’ve summoned Mallus to walk through her doors right then, and she still wouldn’t have spared that demonic megalomaniac the briefest glance.

 

So fine, maybe her parenting skills were slacking a tad, but she and Ava hadn’t had proper one-on-one time in _weeks_ —her chronically incompetent Time Children could run amok for the next hour or so while she _finally_ got laid, she reasoned. 

 

On top of that, they were being almost eerily quiet, and when had that ever happened before?

 

Sara had never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

 

Of course, she didn’t have the faintest clue that her merry band of time-traveling morons had commandeered the jumpship hours ago to drag Mick out to November 1999 Phoenix, Arizona for a decidedly ill-advised birthday excursion led by a hopelessly optimistic Ray, that being the reason for the blessed quiet on the timeship.

 

It wasn’t until Zari’s modified algorithm for tracking anachronisms in the timeline began to beep incessantly that Sara’s day quite promptly took a nosedive. (She was right on the edge of a much-needed climax straddling Ava’s face when Gideon interrupted with her deepest apologies to inform her of the sudden anachronistic activity detected in the timeline that required her immediate attention—she’s sure she’d never felt so positively _murderous_ in her entire life, and that’s counting the days she spent in a debilitating state of bloodlust without her soul trying repeatedly to kill one Thea Queen in Star City.)

 

After dressing quickly and jogging down to the Bridge, she’d cocked a grumpy eyebrow at the evidently sudden arrival of 'Satanic Fire-Worshipping Cultists’ wreaking havoc in the depths of the Arizonan Desert, but was none the wiser as she turned grimly to Ava, then called for Gideon to set a course straight for the overzealous Satanists parading on the outskirts of Phoenix. 

 

Then she'd called for everyone to meet on the Bridge, and _shocker_ —no one showed, not even perpetually straight-laced rule-following Ray. That was right about when she’d begun to suspect that something was up, and knowing her team, it wasn’t going to be good.

 

After sweeping the entire ship with a reluctant Ava and finding it frustratingly empty, she asked Gideon where the _hell_ they’d all gone.

 

“Um, Captain,” Gideon’s cool voice filtered through the ship. “They appropriated the jumpship hours ago.” At that, Sara rolled her eyes dramatically. “And Captain Lance? I think there’s something you should see,” the AI added, prompting Sara to smack a hand against her forehead, wondering what in the world her time-traveling kids could have _possibly_ done now. 

 

Somehow, it was worse than she’d imagined; by no means had she been hoping for the best, but as she and Ava stood watching the footage from Gideon with mouths agape and horror-filled expressions on both their faces, Sara quite seriously debated just leaving those overgrown toddlers out in the desert to be someone else’s problem while she and Ava flew to Aruba for a well-deserved vacation… or maybe Hawaii.

 

Because there they were, clear as day even in the grainy nighttime footage: a positively crazed Mick jumping up and hollering around an obscenely large bonfire, beer in hand; Charlie was whooping happily and sloppily pouring an entire bottle of Jack Daniels onto the flames, letting out delighted yelps as the fire roared in response; Ray had gone off screen minutes ago to start gathering sand and any water he could find in a bucket like the responsible Boy Scout he was, dragging a wide-eyed Nora behind him; John was laughing almost maniacally as he switched between taking long drags of his cigarette and generous gulps from the bottle of tequila in his hand, all while standing precariously close to the flames; Mona and Gary were passed out in the dirt a ways away from the roaring fire, presumably having fainted; Nate and Zari, meanwhile, were standing preternaturally still, just observing the scene before them with visceral shock, probably thinking about just how badly they’d fucked up. 

 

“… Oh my _God_ ,” Ava choked out, voice hoarse. 

 

Sara just nodded, still staring dumbly at the screen, where Mick was flinging the collapsed remains of a poor old Saguaro cactus onto the bonfire as Charlie loudly egged him on. 

 

“Wait,” Ava said then, features scrunching as pandemonium continued on the monitor. “Why is _Gary_ there?” 

 

Sara sighed. “Is that really a question worth asking anymore?”

 

❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄

**Author's Note:**

> should i add to this? still not sure... let me know what you think :)
> 
> (my [tumblr](https://psyches.co.vu/))


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